Senior gardaí realised serious trouble may be afoot on Monday morning as they were reading their “critical incident report”.
The daily report outlines significant alleged crimes that had taken place over the previous 24 hours.
An Irish girl, aged 10 years, in the care of the State’s child and family agency Tusla had alleged she had been sexually assaulted by a foreign man, aged 26.
The alleged assault had taken place at the entrance to the old Citywest hotel complex in west Dublin, now home to an accommodation centre for international protection applicants (IPAS) and Ukrainians.
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The entrance to the centre off Garter Lane in Saggart was sealed off as a crime scene.
The first concern was for the welfare of the girl and arresting the suspect for questioning, which occurred very quickly.
But there were other fears: senior gardaí were immediately concerned that serious violence might flare when details of the alleged attack became public.
Those concerns were grounded specifically in the fact that the case involved a foreign-born adult male as a suspect and a young Irish girl as the victim of the alleged sexual assault.
Early on Monday morning photographs of the crime scene were shared on messaging apps and social media.
News of the alleged attack was seized upon by members of the far right and spread at pace on their networks.
Messages were shared by people such as British far-right figure Tommy Robinson (whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) and the man he claims pays his legal fees, billionaire Elon Musk, owner of social media network X, formerly Twitter. They amplified posts by Irish far-right agitators, ensuring some reached up to 13 million X users.
When a gathering at the Citywest site on Tuesday night was attended by up to 1,000 people, horse-drawn traps and scrambler motorbikes were driven into the Garda lines. Fireworks, bricks and bottles were thrown at gardaí. There was a second night of violence on Wednesday.
After the violence of Tuesday and Wednesday nights, there were more than 30 arrests. Four gardaí have been treated in hospital for injuries.
One significant feature of Tuesday night’s rioting was the extent of live streaming by far-right figures; many were well known and with significant numbers of online followers. A sample of 22 videos of streamed content, broadcast during the violence, totalled 93 minutes. By Tuesday night they had almost 1.2 million combined views and continued to grow exponentially thereafter.
One of the live streamers was Keith O’Brien, who is from Roscommon and goes by the name Keith Woods online. He has built up a large following, including 248,000 followers on X and 30,000 on the Telegram messaging app.
He has interacted with X owner Musk on the billionaire’s platform. In 2023 O’Brien appeared as a speaker at a conference organised by the white supremacist organisation American Renaissance. He is treated as a commentator of substance in US far-right media.
On Tuesday night as the violence unfolded, he filmed footage, including a TV reportage-style piece to camera as a Garda van was engulfed by flames in the background. He has since created more video content using his footage. One of those videos had been viewed more than six million times by Thursday afternoon.
O’Brien interviewed people on camera who falsely complained that international protection applicants (IPs) were being housed in Ireland in “five-star hotels”. These complaints, followed by people wrongly claiming asylum seekers had cars and gaming consoles supplied to them, were interspersed with clips of unidentifiable people sleeping rough on O’Connell St, suggesting that Irish people were homeless and on the streets while foreign asylum seekers were being housed in luxurious accommodation. O’Brien’s interviewees blamed the Government, the media and gardaí for the violence.
“Scumbags, that’s what they are, man – knackers,” one interviewee told O’Brien after being hit by the Garda’s pepper spray.
The footage then immediately showed bricks and other missiles being thrown at lines of public order gardaí.
“Ireland doesn’t need diversity; there’s enough diversity in Europe – get them f**king out,” screamed another man at gardaí as O’Brien recorded his footage in Dublin in videos that have been viewed by millions of people worldwide.
Far-right agitators also used social media this week to whip up anti-migrant sentiment.
“Social media has amplified hateful content and in many cases clear incitement to violence was not removed in the lead-up to the violence and destruction outside Citywest,” said Niamh McDonald of the Hope and Courage Collective, a group that uses research and training and works with communities to build “resilience in the face of rising far-right hate and disinformation”.
McDonald sees the build-up to the riots this week as an example of the “amplification and deepening” of extremism which is “facilitated” by social media companies. Those technology companies do this, she said, by recommending content to their users and by their failure to remove posts that violate their terms of service.
McDonald’s concerns appeared well-founded, as evidenced by the social media posts on Monday morning in the wake of the incident at Citywest.
Just before 8.30am on Monday far-right agitator Paul Nolan posted an image on X, and then a video, of the crime scene.
“Just another day in Citywest,” he wrote. “Crime scene tape at the entrance and inside the grounds this morning.”
The post reached more than 100,000 people, even though the reason for the crime-scene tape was unclear at that point.
A self-described citizen journalist and YouTuber, Nolan (36), of Mount Eagle Square, Leopardstown, Dublin 18, last month became the first person to be jailed, in a landmark case, for online posts that risked identifying asylum seekers, following videos he made in August 2024 at a centre in Dublin. He was jailed for 10 months, with three months suspended, but he has appealed his conviction and so remains at liberty pending that appeal.
His X post of the crime scene was shared on Monday by others, including general and European election candidate, Derek Blighe of Croughevoe, Mitchelstown in Co Cork. He is the former president of Ireland First, an anti-immigration group registered as a political party.
Speculation soon began about the nature of the crime. There was a false claim circulated that it was a fatal stabbing. Established media outlets then reported gardaí were investigating a sexual assault. The Irish Times was the first to outline much of the detail.
As more information emerged about the incident, online posts became angrier and focused on blaming immigration.
One far-right agitator posted on X: “The only thing now is to organise and reign unholy violence and whatever that leads to on these illegal bastards. Absolute violence and worse is the only thing that should happen now. End of.”
Anti-immigration influencer and content creator Michael McCarthy, who has 148,000 followers on X and 106,000 on Facebook, produced a video about the alleged attack. It was viewed 1.3 million times on X.
While viewing figures for Facebook were not available, his post went viral on that platform after it was shared by more than 2,000 users.
He highlighted the fact that international protection applicants were being housed in Citywest after it was bought by the State this year for €148 million “of your money” so it could be used to accommodate “foreigners”.
He also claimed there had been antisocial behaviour by “foreigners” in Saggart, next to the Citywest centre, and other crimes.
“Why can’t people have the balls to say: ‘Send them all back, close the whole system,’” he said, adding that politicians responsible for that “system” should be “thrown in jail”.
Some videos, including on TikTok, calling for a protest at the Citywest centre on Monday night, were viewed 500,000 times.
There was a small gathering of protesters at the centre on Monday evening.
Self-styled citizen journalist Philip Dwyer – much of whose content involves live-streaming gatherings of anti-immigration protesters – was present, as was Dublin city councillor Gavin Pepper, who is well known for pushing anti-immigration views.
Dwyer told his viewers the Citywest centre, a former hotel and convention centre, had been “turned into a plantation centre, state-sponsored people trafficking centre”.
On Wednesday, after news of the alleged attack in the early hours of Monday had been widely and accurately reported by the media, the online rhetoric went into overdrive across social media platforms and Telegram. Some of the content encouraged violence and encouraged people to attend a protest that evening.
[ Wild West nature of business of accommodating asylum seekers has been laid bareOpens in new window ]
Garda sources said as they monitored social media and Telegram throughout Wednesday, it became clear a protest would happen and that it would probably be violent. Preparations for a big policing presence were ramped up to include gardaí on horseback, the Garda helicopter, a water cannon and more Public Order Unit gardaí.
A small far-right group called Sinne Na Daoine (SnD), meaning “We the People”, was among the first to call for a large-scale protest in Citywest on Wednesday night. It claimed “Citywest residents are calling on support for public assembly” and directly linked that claimed call to the alleged sexual assault at Citywest on Monday.
Sinne Na Daoine was founded by Anthony Casey, a former Courts Service registrar, who ran unsuccessfully for the far-right Irish Freedom Party in last year’s general election. It seeks to publicise what it claims are crimes committed by foreign-born people across Ireland and claims to carry out vigilante-style so-called community patrols.
The National Party, another far-right organisation, called for a protest to take place on Tuesday night “at the Citywest plantation centre”.
Around the same time, Robinson posted about the alleged sexual attack. He pointed out online that the accused was assigned an Arabic interpreter in court on Tuesday morning and granted free legal aid, “all paid for by the Irish taxpayer!”. Two of his posts about the alleged attack reached more than 200,000 X users combined.
Well-known far-right social media figure Michael O’Keeffe (40), who has previously given an address at The Quay in Waterford, told his 229,000 followers on Tuesday that “everything changed” due to the alleged attack.
Another of his posts on X about the incident was viewed 13 million times after X owner, Musk, shared it with one word: “Terrible”. Musk follows O’Keeffe on the platform and regularly shares his content with the billionaire’s 228 million followers on his network.
“Get them out – out, out, out,” replied one of O’Keeffe’s followers underneath his post, to which O’Keeffe replied: “Every last one”.
Within hours, lines of gardaí were under attack as they held off a mob of rioters outside the Citywest centre.
